Treason

F Ryan asks:  "I wonder Titus, in light of this, are you still willing to award him the greatest hero since 1913 award?"

In all honesty, perhaps not "greatest" hero status... but "patriot" status at least.  It is tough to place him in the same list as the names you gave... but I'll get back to that in a second.

First of all, I want to address this:

F Ryan says:  "I think he did us a great favor in alerting us to the gross overreach of our own government. He could have stopped there. And had he, I would defend him as a brave civil liberties warrior, worthy of praise. But he didn't. He went further. And at that moment he became guilty of treason, in my eyes."

Treason.  Really?  This is worth looking into.

As I understand the definition of "treason", it is "The betrayal of one's own country by waging war against it or by consciously or purposely acting to aid its enemies".  The word "traitor" (one who commits treason) comes from the Latin traditor, or "one whom delivers"... and it is long considered the highest crime one could commit.  Our western society holds traitors amongst its most hated members... Brutus, John Wilkes Booth and the four others convicted of killing Lincoln, Benedict Arnold.  My God, the very deepest level of Hell is reserved for (and named after) the greatest traitor of them all:  Judas Iscariot.

No, I don't think what he did qualifies him as a "traitor".  He blew a whistle that alerted the public to gross over-reach by the government, in all three areas that you defined... and in all three areas there has proven to be no adequate oversight by any governmental or non-governmental element... thus making the entire business illegal and beyond the scope of legitimate authority.

Had he circumvented or avoided some sort of legitimate means of bringing the questionable conduct and activity to light, then I'd sing a different tune... but there were no alternative means for him to follow that would have availed him at all.  One cannot say its okay to hide some illegal activity, but not all of it.  It was all illegal, it is all unconstitutional, and it is all indefensible in my eyes because it never, at any point, had any legitimate oversight or stop-gaps that would or could be employed... EVER.

And as long as we are throwing the label of traitor around... do you know who else was called "traitor" to their country?

George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and everyone else that signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th 1776, officially separating Great Britain with the new "United States of America".  All those men did was place their individual principals and ethics above their personal safety and material well-being.  Can you say with honest belief that Snowden did less?